


Awake

by Haberdasher



Series: Twitch Plays Pokemon [30]
Category: Pocket Monsters | Pokemon (Main Video Game Series), Twitch Plays Pokemon - Fandom
Genre: Gen, Twitch Plays Pokemon, Twitch Plays Pokemon Red, Twitch Plays Red
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-07
Updated: 2014-03-07
Packaged: 2018-03-03 08:40:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,019
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2844848
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Haberdasher/pseuds/Haberdasher
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Red wakes up at home after winning his Championship battle.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Awake

Red tossed and turned in his sleep. He had dreams of Pokemon with swords and running on platforms… And the voices, cheering and complaining and guiding the actions of every dream…

But as the dreams went on, they began to quiet, and the worlds within his sleeping mind grew silent.

Red opened his eyes.

The beige walls in his bedroom stared back at him. They were a familiar sight, one he’d long since grown accustomed to over the years, one he’d longed for sorely while forced on that strange and terrible journey.

…that’s right, he’d been adventuring…

So how did he get here?

Red forced his mind, still filled with fog and fantastical images, to remember. He’d been up against Blue, in the Elite Four… Blue had been Champion, and they were fighting… He had a Zapdos, the legendary Zapdos, and it… It had beaten him? He’d become Champion?

And Oak was there, wasn’t he? And congratulated him?

But Red still couldn’t remember how he’d gone from that hallowed hall of Champions to his own bedroom.

Had… had they…

It took him a minute to realize that something was different. He could hear himself think, for the first time since he’d left his house that day, since they’d taken control of him. It was quiet.

Maybe it had all been a dream, a long, drawn-out nightmare. He’d never had dreams quite so vivid before, but there was a first time for everything, wasn’t there? It was a dream, and soon enough he’d forget, and everything would go back to normal, and life would go on.

That’s when Red noticed the six pairs of eyes staring at him. The Pokemon that he’d gathered over the course of his adventure, those which he’d befriended- if you could call it that, really, when they weren’t quite friends and it hadn’t really been him working with them… They were all gathered around his bedside, watching him sleep, examining his every move.

He closed his eyes and let sleep claim him once more.

These dreams were muddled and indistinct, and he could only grasp the faintest impressions of what had occurred. There had been Pallet Town, and it was every inch the town that he’d grown up in. But it was still, too still, without the grass swaying in the breeze or the ocean waves beating against the sand or Pidgeys singing gentle choruses into the wind. Nothing moved at all in this vision of Pallet Town, a town been frozen in time, and it was colorless and pale, as if all the life had been drained from it. And then his surroundings had turned a uniform gray, shaking all around him, with whispers of words too indistinct to be understood but of a pattern that he knew all too well…

And then a tree branch kept scratching his cheek, and he couldn’t move his arms to brush it away, and it kept scratching and scratching until blood started to trickle down his face but there was nothing he could do to stop it…

As Red awoke, the whispers faded until their sound was eclipsed by that of his racing heartbeat. He could no longer feel anything dripping down his cheek, and his face was no longer stained with red, but the scratching remained, though it was gentler now.

He was still in his bedroom, but now he didn’t have to glance around the room to learn that he was not alone; talons were digging into his shoulder, and feathers brushing against his cheek. He instinctively swatted at the tickling on his cheek, earning a disapproving look from the Pidgeot who had perched on him and an ache where his hand had connected with his cheek.

But… wait, did that mean…

Red brought his hand back down to his side and stared as he flexed his fingers. He turned his head to his side, which made the Pidgeot caw and fly off, claws scratching him as the bird departed. Lifting his head off of the pillow gave him a pounding headache, but it could still be done, and that was what mattered.

The voices were gone, and he could move on his own again.

That horrific journey hadn’t been just a bad dream; the Pidgeot and Zapdos flying in circles around the room, and the other four Pokemon gathered around his bedside, made that much clear. But they were gone, it was over.

He was free.

Red looked around the room at the Pokemon that surrounded him. It hadn’t been him that caught them and trained them and taught them. But maybe that didn’t matter anymore. They’d just have to learn to accept him, the real him, as their Trainer. After all, they weren’t getting their old master back.

"Hi, guys." he said, his voice weak and hoarse. Though he’d crossed all of Kanto with this team of Pokemon, this was the first thing he had said to them outside of battle.

The peaceful room immediately descended into a site of chaos and cacophony. The two birds began circling faster, their wings hitting the ceiling and dislodging small chunks of paint. Omastar crawled up the bed and climbed onto his head, leaving a trail of slime behind, and the weight of its body making Red’s headache all the worse. The Pokemon poked and prodded and nuzzled him, running and stomping and soaring all across the small bedroom.

Red put his hand up. “Guys… guys?” But the noise and the shaking didn’t stop.

"Please, guys, can you not do that? Please?" His hands were shaking now. The noise, the chaos, the aimless movement… he could barely hear himself think… No… it couldn’t stay like this…

He cleared his throat, then gathered up all the strength he could muster.

"STOP!"

His voice cracked in the middle of the word, but his speech accomplished his goal. Those on the ground stopped dead in their tracks; the two birds careened into the ground and sat down; Omastar slid down Red’s neck onto the floor and hid under the bed. It was calm again. Everything was okay, everything would be okay.

As the din of the Pokemon movement settled down, Red heard footsteps growing nearer. He sat up as best he could and watched the door, which flung open as his mother ran towards him.

"Red?"

Their eyes met. It had only been a few days since he’d seen her last, but he wasn’t the one who had decided to go back home and play around with the old PC gathering dust in his room, or who had walked past his mother over and over again without saying a word. He hoped that she could tell the difference.

He smiled. “Hi, Mom.”

She pulled him into a tight hug, so tight it made him ache a little bit. “Oh, Red, you’re awake! How are you feeling? Do you need anything? Is there anything I can do to help!”

"Mom… Mom, calm down."

"I was so worried about you! I thought I’d lost you! I… I thought you were…" Red felt a teardrop on his face as she ended her embrace and he fell back onto the bed. He wasn’t quite sure whose it was.

"It’s okay, Mom." He took a deep breath. "How did I get here? I beat Blue… and then what?"

"Oak was registering your Pokemon, and when he turned around you were on the floor, and you weren’t moving… and then the doctors, the doctors said you should’ve been dead, they weren’t sure you’d ever wake up…" Her hands clasped his. "Oh, I’ll have to tell Oak you’re awake, and Blue, and have the doctors come check up on you… I knew I should have stayed with you, I stayed up the first two nights and then they said-"

"The first two nights? The FIRST two nights? How long has it been?"

She breathed in and out and in again before replying, her eyes locked onto his. “…six days.”

He closed his eyes. Six more days gone… that made it over three weeks, three full weeks of his life that he would never get back because of it, because of them.

"Oh, I knew I should’ve stayed up, I could tell you were getting better last night because you kept tossing and turning in your sleep and mumbling something, letters and numbers and directions and something about starting-"

Up, down, left, right, A, B, start, start9, down2a9…  _Up, up, left, down, right, up, A, A, start, B, right, up…_  The words echoed through his mind, creating a pattern that wasn’t a pattern, a cacophony he never wanted to hear again.. 

"Red, are you alright? You look really pale- let me go call a doctor…" And then his mother turned around and started walking away, and the only eyes that watched him were the eyes of the Pokemon that had followed him on the journey, the ones that had gotten to know him not as not himself but as they had made him…

No. No, it was done, they were gone, they had to be gone, it was done, they were gone, it wasn’t real, it wasn’t happening, it was over, it was all over, they were gone…

"No!"

Red hadn’t meant to shout, but some part of him had expected the resistance that he’d grown all too familiar with over those sixteen days. Some part of him had thought that he wouldn’t be able to make any sound at all.

What he heard now wasn’t the voices- they were gone now, weren’t they, they were really and truly gone- but the sound of his heartbeat racing and his own quick and heavy breathing. His mother turned to face him again, her eyebrows raised and eyes open wide.

"What’s wrong, honey?"

"Don’t go. Don’t leave me. I’m okay, just… don’t ask me about that again."

She walked over to his side again, her footsteps slow and soft.

"Okay, I won’t."

His mother looked at him, not quite meeting his eyes. She opened her mouth, but closed it again almost immediately. The room fell silent. He wasn’t quite sure if he was supposed to be the one to speak now, or if so, what she expected him to say. If she wanted more of an explanation for his outburst, she was going to be disappointed; he didn’t think he could get into it, not right now, not without his mind going in circles again, without that fear returning and engulfing him…

After a few minutes, the silence started lulling him to sleep, and he closed his eyes.

"Red?"

"Yes?"

"Don’t EVER pull a stunt like that again, you hear me?"

He laughed for the first time in three weeks. “I’ll try not to.”

"Good. Because next time I won’t forgive you this easily, you got that? Don’t say I didn’t warn you."

He just kept laughing and laughing. It was an empty threat, of course, and that was part of what made it so funny, her trying so hard to seem strict but once again failing miserably. But that wasn’t the whole reason he laughed. He laughed because his brain was still in that half-asleep mode where the stupidest things can seem hilarious. He laughed because he could, because he had gone so long without laughing or crying or showing any emotion and it all came bursting out.

And he laughed because he was back in his bedroom, back in his small but comfortable bed, and he could see the half-wilted tree in the corner that Mom never remembered to water, and the SNES that he would play for hours nonstop, and she would threaten to unplug it or give it away or throw it out the window so he’d have to go play outside but never actually did anything besides prod him when he needed to eat or do chores, and the blinds with the one broken slat from when he’d thrown his alarm clock at them three years back and she’d never gotten around to replacing it…

He laughed because, finally, everything was back to normal.


End file.
